Mass failure: JAMB reschedule UTME for 379,997 candidates

By Mariam Abeeb

The Joint Admissions Matriculation Board, JAMB has announced that the 379,997 candidates affected in the five states of the South East and Lagos will be rescheduled for another Unified Tertiary and Matriculation Examination.

This was revealed by the Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede during a press briefing in Abuja.

He explained that  over 300,000 candidates in the five states of the South East geographical zone and Lagos were affected by the glitches in the 2025 UTME.

“We have decided that all the candidates affected in the 157 centres out of 882 centres will be contacted to retake their examinations starting from Friday, May 16, 2025.These candidates are to be contacted through textmessages addressed to their registered phone numbers, their email addresses, their profiles and phone calls by JAMB. They are directed to reprint their Examination Slips for the rescheduled examination dates.

“While not oblivious of the fact that WAEC examinations are ongoing, we have contacted WAEC and in an unprecedented show of solidarity, the Council has graciously decided to as much as possible accommodate us within the WAEC time-slot.  Any candidate with a clash of timetable, particularly for Agricultural Science on Friday, would be rescheduled.

“However, we have endeavored to ensure that no such exist.  Most, if not all,such candidates are scheduled for Saturday.  Fortunately, the prescribed texts for SSCE are also the prescribed texts for UTME apart from the reading text of the UTME, which carries just 10 marks in our Use of English test,” he noted.

“206,610 in 65 centres were affected in Lagos and 92 centres in Owerri zone comprising of 173,387 candidates in the five states of the South East were affected.”

It could be recalled that of the 1.9 million candidates who sat the UTME, over 1.5 million reportedly scored below 200 out of the maximum 400 marks, raising concerns across the education sector.

Oloyede who took responsibility for what he described as a “sabotage” of the 2025 UTME said the affected candidates will start getting text messages from the Board starting Thursday.

He assured that quality assurance is cardinal to the operations of JAMB.

“I can assure you that we scale all heights, fathom all depths and traverse all horizons to ascertain that quality assurance mechanisms permeate all our operations from the take off point to the finish line. We burn the midnight oil and we set our standardshigh.

“This is why we have guidelines, checklists and protocol guiding our activities right from the time of registration to the points of monitoring and supervision to the processing of results.